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The Star’s Oakland Ross wanted to understand how the universe works. Alas, he’s allergic to math. So he buckled down and read several daunting books and spent hours on the phone with theoretical physicists. His six-part primer on the universe first ran in the pages of Toronto Star and is now available as the Star Dispatches ebook The Universe Explained: Guaranteed 99% Math Free. It’s a witty ramble through concepts such as relativity, gravity, space-time and other crazy stuff. We thought our online readers would like a small taste of what’s available. Click here to buy the book, or use the links at the end of the story.

It’s tempting to imagine that our universe was preceded by some sort of void — a vast, greyish tract of four-dimensional vacant space, maybe with a For Sale sign, patiently waiting around for something to come along and fill it.

Before the universe was created, there was no void and there were no dimensions. There was neither space nor time.

In the beginning, there was nothing — or very close to it.

“We didn’t have quite nothing,” says Robert Mann, a physicist at the University of Waterloo. “We had energy fluctuating in and out of nothing.”

A good time to invest in real estate, no? Except, of course, there was no real estate.

Instead, at an astonishing moment roughly 14 billion years ago, the blurry probabilities that govern quantum mechanics — a realm where nothing is certain, where all is rooted in doubt — somehow conspired to produce a sudden, monumentally powerful expansion of what had been an infinitely small point.

Nowadays, we refer to that extraordinary event as the Big Bang.

“In quantum mechanics, on small scales, everything is fluctuating,” explains Lawrence M. Krauss, a prominent U.S. theoretical physicist and author of A Universe from Nothing. “Because of that, if you wait long enough, one of the possibilities is that empty space could spit out particles.”

And, verily, it did.

In the summer of 2012, at the Large Hadron Collider laboratory, researchers culminated a long, high-velocity quest by detecting what seemed to be the most elusive of those particles, a minuscule dot of putative existence called the Higgs boson. On March 2013, after months of experiments to prove what they had found, scientists confirmed that it was indeed the Higgs boson particle.

Two teams working independently at the same facility accelerated subatomic particles called protons to velocities just shy of the speed of light, causing collisions that mimicked conditions in the first moments of the universe’s existence, shattering protons into more basic particles.

Sometimes referred to as the God particle because it is believed to have imbued other particles with mass, the Higgs boson started out as a postulate, part of a complex theoretical recreation of the universe’s early life that is known as the Standard Model.

Led by Enrico Fermi, an American physicist who played a prominent role in the construction of the first atomic bomb, scientists worked out most of the math behind the Standard Model roughly half a century ago, but there was a big problem.

“When the theory was written, the equations worked,” explains Christoph Paus, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “But they would only work if the particles had no mass.”

Particles without mass?

They do exist. The particles that constitute light — known as photons — have no rest mass. But it is quite evident that other particles do.

The math, however, said otherwise. It said the universe ought to be composed of radiant energy — and nothing else.

In 1964, a Scottish scientist named Peter Higgs and several others jointly came up with a provisional solution to the problem by postulating the existence of a mass-exporting particle that came to be known as the Higgs boson, a point in space that existed only in theory. Nobody had ever encountered one.

Assuming it existed, the Higgs boson was among a menagerie of 16 subatomic particles that appeared during the first moments of the universe’s life. The particles fall into two categories, fermions and bosons, which differ from each other in several ways. No two fermions can occupy the same space at the same time, for example, while multiple bosons can. There were 12 kinds of fermions and four kinds of bosons, if you include the Higgs.

Fermions can be considered the constituent parts of matter, while bosons are better thought of as “force carriers.” Until fairly recently, there were thought to be four fundamental forces in the universe, most of which serve to bind stuff together. It was the bosons’ job to transmit one or another of these properties to other particles.

The four forces are, or were, the electromagnetic force — which can be attractive or repulsive — and the strong and weak nuclear forces, plus gravity, which has not so far been found to play any role in the behaviour of extremely small particles. Nowadays, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force are deemed to be the same phenomenon, known as the electroweak force.

Born amid scarcely imaginable heat, the universe cooled during the first instants of its existence from several trillion degrees centigrade to a few billion degrees, while the particles and forces interacted at a truly frenetic pace. With the universe still less than one second old, the 16 particles that existed at the outset had combined or decayed, leaving two kinds of nuclear particles — protons and neutrons — both imbued with mass and both swimming in a scaldingly hot sea of electrons, photons and neutrinos.

Photons are the bearers of light. Neutrinos don’t interact much with anything else. Protons, neutrons and electrons do interact, and they are the building blocks of all the physical objects we see around us today.

Eventually, after three minutes or so, the protons and neutrons began to form themselves into what would later become the nuclei of atoms. But it was still far too hot for much else to happen.

Several hundreds of thousands of years would have to pass before the universe had cooled enough so that these nuclei could combine with orbiting electrons to produce atoms, which eventually arranged themselves into molecules, first forming hydrogen and helium and eventually the stuff of planets, galaxies and stars, a process described in painstaking detail by Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg in his book, The First Three Minutes.

Scientists refer to the process as the “Higgs mechanism,” and so far it is not fully understood.

According to the Standard Model, the Higgs boson created an associated “field,” known as the “Higgs field.”

Paus at MIT explains that a field is a physical region where conditions vary according to a given criterion.

“In your office, in every part, you have different temperatures,” he says. “This is the temperature field. If you had a fan in your office, you would have a field of velocities of air.”

A useful analogy for the Higgs field and its influence on other particles is the so-called “Margaret Thatcher effect,” a reference to the former British prime minister, who was a colossal political force in her day. The analogy was dreamt up last year by David Miller, a physicist at the University College London.

Imagine Thatcher swanning through a crowded room while at the height of her powers. Most of the minions in her vicinity would naturally veer toward her, owing to her authority and influence, and so the distribution of the crowd in the room — analogous to the Higgs field — would become distorted, or asymmetrical, as more and more hangers-on shifted to be closer to the Iron Lady, thereby imbuing her with mass.

This, metaphorically, is what happens when a particle moves through the Higgs field.

For all its mass-giving properties, the Higgs particle is itself a rapidly decaying affair, with a lifespan measured in the minutest fractions of a second. It made only a momentary appearance in the early pageant of our universe’s history and promptly vanished. But the field it engendered lives on.

“The Higgs field continues to exist throughout the universe,” says Krauss. “If the Higgs field didn’t exist, the universe would look very different, and you and I wouldn’t exist. What’s nice about the Higgs field is it validates the idea we’ve had of inflation in the early universe.”

This idea of inflation — a brief but incredibly rapid super-expansion of the universe during its early moments — has not been confirmed scientifically, or at least not yet. First proposed by U.S. physicist Alan Guth in 1980, inflation would have caused the universe to double in size repeatedly, perhaps as many as 100 times, in just a few microseconds — an exponential rate of increase that is mind-numbing to contemplate.

Consider the famous tale of Lord Krishna playing chess against a local maharaja. As a reward if he should win, Krishna requests some grains of rice, their quantity to be calculated in this manner: one grain on the first square of the chess board, two on the second, four on the third and so on, until all 64 squares are accounted for.

The math shows that, on the 64th square alone, Krishna will earn more than 18 quintillion grains of rice (18 followed by 18 zeroes) or enough, it is said, to cover all of India to a depth of several metres in rice.

Assuming inflation took place, the universe would have expanded even further and more quickly than Lord Krishna’s rice — a stupendous rate of growth, achieved heart-stoppingly fast. As a result, any minute asymmetries in mass that were caused by the Higgs field would have assumed an enormous scale.

Roughly 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe had cooled sufficiently for subatomic particles to coalesce into atoms. Until this point, the cosmos had been too opaque for light to radiate, but now electromagnetic waves raced through the heavens. Somewhere around a billion years after the birth of time, stars and galaxies began to take shape.

“As the universe cooled, it kind of froze into its present configuration,” says Krauss.

About four billion years ago, our own planet formed itself from the cast-off material of stars. Humans have been around for roughly 100,000 years, a period that represents a mere jot on the calendar of universal time, but it’s important to us.

The big question, of course, is why. Why did any, or all, of this happen? Why did a cosmic ballet of buzzing particles and exquisitely balanced forces conspire to produce this swirling domain of stars, planets and mysteries?

For that question, scientists have no answer.

“Ultimately, we do not have an idea of why the particles are the way they are,” says Paus.

Nor do scientists have a single unified explanation of the universe, the so-called Theory of Everything, a comprehensive system of causes and effects that would reconcile the forces operating at the subatomic level with gravity, which rules the realm of large objects but plays no known role in nuclear processes.

Many experts put their faith in string theory, an interpretation of the physical world that posits the existence of many more dimensions than the four we think we know — three spatial dimensions plus time.

“String theory still dominates a large area of theoretical particle physics,” says David Bailey, a physicist at the University of Toronto. “String theory was the first quantum theory of gravity that wasn’t obviously wrong.”

But he concedes that a single universal theory that explains all things, both large and small, remains maddeningly elusive. Even Einstein, who spent the second half of his life searching for a single, coherent explanation of the universe, came up short in the end.

“There has been an army of people working on this, and we don’t have it yet,” says Mann at the University of Waterloo. “There’s no guarantee that the human mind can understand the entire thing.”

Nonetheless, scientists keep trying to bridge the gaping mysteries that remain, including the ongoing conundrum of dark energy and dark matter, both invisible and so far undetectable. Dark energy is thought to represent about 70 per cent of the stuff in the universe, with dark matter contributing roughly 25 per cent. The Earth and everything else we can see contribute the remaining 5 per cent.

Apart from this, almost nothing is known about the dark majority of creation, except that its existence is required to explain the universe’s expansion.

As for the long-range forecast for the entire cosmos, it is looking pretty grim.

“Cold and dark and empty,” says Krauss.

For a time, it was thought there were three possible fates for the universe. It might expand forever but at an ever-decreasing pace. Or its expansion might gradually slow to a halt. Or the expansion might eventually reverse itself so that the universe would start to contract, a long process that would finally end in a Big Crunch, the opposite of the Big Bang.

“Now we know that none of the above is going to happen,” says Krauss.

Instead, it now appears, the universe is fated to go on expanding forever — and at a constantly accelerating pace.

“Galaxies will move away faster than the speed of light,” says Krauss. “That was something we didn’t expect.”

Although impossible for objects travelling through space, faster-than-light speeds are feasible for the expansion of space itself.

Eventually, the rest of the universe will have shot away so far and so fast that only the light from the stars in our own galaxy will be able to reach us, and so the heavens will dim.

In time, the great nuclear cauldrons of the Milky Way will exhaust their fuel — as will the now-invisible stars contained in the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the rest of the universe — and the entire cosmos will go dark.

The residual matter coasting toward oblivion will decay into lightless radiation, like so many ephemeral rats scuttling away through a dark, silent and eternal night.

“The more the universe seems comprehensible,” writes Weinberg in The First Three Minutes, “the more it also seems pointless. The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lift human life a little above the level of farce, and give it some of the grace of tragedy.”

In other words, the great questions that have haunted our species since we first stood upright and peered across an African plain — why is there space? why is there time? why is there anything at all? — will finally render themselves moot, for no one will be left to wonder, much less await the answers.

And yet, stubborn inquisitors that they are, scientists keep right on searching.

“Maybe the universe is like an onion,” says Krauss. “We keep pulling back another skin. We just want to know more and more about what it’s all about.”

Have you any unanswered why’s about the universe around us? Few have unravelled the mysteries the universe as easily and entertainingly as veteran Star feature writer Oakland Ross does in Universe. The full ebook is through through the Star’s weekly electronic book program, Star Dispatches. Go to Star Dispatches.com and subscribe for $1/week. Single copies are available for $2.99 at stardispatches.com/starstore and stardispatches.com/itunes.

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